International Development Research Centre

Challenge

IDRC’s main public-facing website wasn’t easily accessible or responsive, and failed to demonstrate its international value to potential donors, research partners, potential employees and media sources.

How we made life better

We redesigned and redeveloped IDRC’s public website using Drupal. This optimized and prioritized content, helping research organizations easily find critical information about funding and resources to continue their life-saving work. Highlights of the solution included:

Drupal CMS implementation: To enable the IDRC internal team to easily manage the website and its content, we migrated content from SharePoint to Drupal. And by providing iterative training throughout the site’s development, we were able to ensure administrators were confident using the CMS long before launch.

Optimized and streamlined content: We gained an in-depth understanding of users’ needs, including that key audiences in remote locations had limited internet access and were struggling to quickly find relevant information on the site. We redesigned the information architecture of the site to prioritize the types of content different audiences were seeking, and designed page templates for fast loading speeds with optimized content – essential in remote locations with low bandwidth.

Bilingual responsive design: Accessible on almost any device and browser, the responsive and bilingual website featured custom social-sharing functionality to make finding, reading and sharing content simple among research networks.